"Because of men," came the reply. "Men get us to wear them so they can watch us wiggle and wobble."

I had argued about this with women before, and I didn't want to go through it again. But the question remained: Why do men wear ties, anyway? What are ties for?

I am pretty ambivalent about ties myself. As a kid, I went to a school where all the boys had to wear ties, and this pretty well brainwashed me. For years afterward, whenever I went into a nice restaurant and saw some male diner without a tie, I wanted to report him to the principal's office.

But how did this get started? The encyclopedias say that the kind of tie we wear now (technically, it's called a "four-in-hand," probably referring to the number of hands you need to tie it properly without cheating and holding the end of the tie in your mouth, as I used to do as a kid at that tie-mandating school) came into vogue in the mid-1800s. But they don't say why.

One woman suggested to me that the tie was a phallic symbol. I thought about that a bit. Then I decided that if we guys were going to walk around toting phallic symbols, we wouldn't put little paisley squiggles all over them.

Probably it was some king that started wearing ties. That's how all those fashions used to get started. For example, we tie our ties now in Windsor knots, because that's how the Duke of Windsor did it, right?

Lucky for us the duke didn't take to wearing a dead fish around his neck.

I started to grow ambivalent about ties as I got older and and, in a most unwelcome fashion development, my shirt collars began to grow tighter and tighter. I could, of course, leave the top button unbuttoned, but I couldn't do that if I was wearing a tie. The collar gets crooked and the tie slips to one side. Some guys could do this and look rakish, like Humphrey Bogart in "Deadline U.S.A." When I did it, I looked like Ray Milland at the end of "The Lost Weekend."

This will never do, especially now that executive-type guys have started wearing "power ties," ties in bold, bright colors that are supposed to project an image of forcefulness and authority. This seems a dubious concept, though. Why would you want a power symbol that you can spill your soup on?

But my tie habit got a jolt when I took at trip to Hawaii last year. Nobody wears ties there. I mean nobody. Anyone found wearing a tie is suspected of being a Russian spy.

That seemed like the right idea to me, so I stopped wearing ties for a while when I went back to work. At first nobody noticed my nude neck, mainly because they were distracted by my new Hawaiian shirt, which looks like a tropical sunset with hiccups.

But old habits die hard, so I'm back to wearing ties. And I still don't know why.

If men need some ornamental piece of clothing to complete their wardrobes, can't it be something less suffocating? Surely we can come up with a tie substitute.

Maybe, if we need that little splash of color, we could wear numbers. You know, like on football uniforms.

Sport a paisley "27" on your gray flannel suit, front and back. Or a striped "56," or a "78" with little horse heads on it. That would certainly be masculine enough for the most power-image-hungry executive.

The only danger is some people might carry it to extremes and start wearing helmets, too. But the way it is around the office some days, that might not be a bad idea.